And All Shall Be Discordia
by Eternalis
Summary: Derived from a dream I had, with technically two chapters but short enough to leave as one, heavily based on movies and music. Rated T for certain descriptions.


This came from a dream I had (augmented by random thoughts and odd impressions), which is technically classified as fanfic because for some reason the _Day_ _After_ _Tomorrow_ theme was playing, which somehow mingled into the instrumental of Constance Demby's "Mother of the World," which somehow morphed into "Song of Keening" by Aine Minogue. There is movie/game influence here, but you'll have to guess ... there's a huge clue in it. This story asks that you make a fundamental change in your memory of the story in question. It is entirely abstract-not fluff, but not intended to be a filled-in alternate continuity, not serious, only speculative. It is nothing more and nothing less than a fragment of time.

I dream of a world soaked in my blood. No, not my blood. The blood of those like me. I dream in sorrow and rage and unchecked, evil joy. I dream in heavy premonition. And yet I do not know if I am awake or still dreaming, for all the world is becoming the evil in my inmost sight.

I stand on a hillside overlooking a modest-sized city. A massive cloud rises to stain the morning sky a sick, decaying color and I have the frightening feeling that I have already died with it. I look down into the city and see something that would chill my blood, if my blood were still warm. The city to which I journeyed to uncover a deadly secret and save my world lies in ruin. Its once-lively streets are ghostly and empty, every now and then pierced by the eerie cries of some unnatural creature. Most of it has been leveled, but here and there fires still burn among the rubble.

I focus in on the city, my sight now so much more acute than before. The heavy, dark wind carries the scent of death, fire, fear and grief to me, but it also brings two scents that I fear above all others: the abrasive metallic tang of radioactivity, and a scent I do not wish to describe, the scent of taint. I scan the ruins with finely-honed sight, augmented by electronics to encompass several different spectra. I hope to see nothing moving. I do not expect to see anything living.

Gripped by a morbid fascination, held by memories I cannot quite form into a whole, I set off at a run toward the city. I attain great speeds effortlessly, the ground seeming to fly away beneath my feet, and I glide through the ruined streets, nimbly dodging dangerous debris with lightning reflexes. I become movement itself, surrendering myself to motion, because I know my feet will carry me to the place I must find. Its location is indelibly etched upon my memory. She is there, her presence a beacon, she and a cluster of pure lifesigns my long-range sensors pick up from here.

As I close in on the courtyard I can smell them, the scent of their blood quickening in some senseless part of my mind that should never have been. It locks on to the scent. It lusts for anything alive, anything with blood still in its veins. I find myself in a position I have never been in before: teetering on the edge of surrendering to it, of letting that cold and simple grasp make me like all that I have come to hate. I have never experienced this dilemma before. It frightens me, more than my own death-for that has already happened. It happened yesterday morning. Or the morning before that. Or a hundred years ago. I may exist for centuries, never aware of exactly when I died.

I reach a courtyard that was once mostly ringed by faceless towers of steel and glass. I have sensed movement already, but in it there is no life. The pure lifesigns have already taken to the sky, the scent of their blood faded with distance and chemicals and the confusion of scents around me. I know what I will see when I reach the place where I died-not the first time. I will never quite remember the first time. It was the second time. I wonder, if I die a third time, will I finally simply let go?

The space is cluttered with debris. Figures scrabble and crawl among the rubble, searching for anything bloody. Blood consumes their every action, but they have no minds for it to destroy. They all smell of bitterness, radioactivity, death, and taint. A few sit slumped on the sidelines, rejects even among the senseless. Some rock slightly, but others are still, staring off into space. One man has half a face-the other side is nothing more than shattered bone, scorched black and dusty. I can see his eye socket, sheared away by flame, but the back is still intact, and his brain has not been destroyed. He is still moving. A little girl looks up at me with milk-white eyes and hisses, scrabbling backward across the broken, black pavement. Around her, others lurch or crawl away, a mass exodus of the mindless. But then, what am I?

I look down and see the gnawed bones of a person they have not finisher with. Someone has begun picking at his face but something in me still recognizes him, the one man I hate more bitterly than any being that has yet lived. I slam one heel down across his jaw, neatly severing the top of his head from the bottom half. I step over him, searching the ground, but I know it is useless, because her scent is cold. Not-living and not-taint, I would know it anywhere; it is unique. I have a sudden flash of my last moments, lying battered by debris in this courtyard, barely conscious, burning alive.

Something moves. A dizzying sensation of changing position without moving comes over me, something I can't quite describe, just as I can't describe how I ran across the city after I died, and awoke in a body that should have been dead because I was not actually dead yet. I wasn't dead, so I did not die-it is simple, yet unexplainable.

Somehow I grasp control of what now lives in my veins and force it to jump start cell production again. I don't know how I determine that they stay the same, but I don't think about it-it's simply a given that they must. With a mighty shove I roll sideways, pushing debris off of me, sitting up, looking around. I pick cold lead from my chest and arms, and watch mortal wounds fade with the cell production I have forced into action, and for a time I watch the town burn.

I leave the city. I will hide, somehow, but I will not return here. I have failed in the last thing I ever attempted to do.

The weeks pass by slowly at first. The world, though temporarily stirred by the incident at the city, moves on nonetheless. I am too conspicuous by day, so I move only at night. And yet the air is laden with taint. It will only be a matter of time. I journey sometimes with the spread, sometimes outside of it. I do not enter cities, for fear of capture, for fear that someone will recognize me that does not look like me, but the world is disorganized, and they cannot find me. So I wander, and time blurs, and for me, for whom aging does not exist, time might as well stop completely. Soon I wander a dead world. Sometimes I find ways to gather news of the world outside the barren lands. But that world shrinks too quickly to keep up. And within a year everything is gone.

So I wander. I sit in dormancy in caves for months at a time. I have moments of hope, I turn to the desert wind and search for her not-live not-tainted scent, I curse myself for imagining that I would intrude upon her life (if she is still there), I go back to wandering, and eventually find another place to lie dormant. I need very little sustenance. I am and am not the unliving. I walk among them. I am and am not the living. I pass by the pitiful dregs of society that have survived, depending on your definition of survival. I exist as a perversion of life, a paradox. I need no time and no life. I do not need to travel to be everywhere. Everywhere is all the same. The desert has claimed the world. The clouds will never lift, but the rains will never come. And as long as that condition lasts, time has been suspended.

I do not keep track of the years. Sometimes, knowing I cannot die and not caring if I can, I wander nearer to their facilities, listening for their transmissions. I hack into my electronics, reprogramming them, making them stronger, but there is only so much I can do with my onboard equipment. So I raid their occasional expeditions when they are small enough. I learn battle strategy better than any computer-implanted memory has taught me: through experience. I turn from despair to vengeance, and begin to pick their numbers down through any way I can. I do not hesitate, I use every low tactic I can remember or devise. Playing fair is ridiaulously overrated. I probably didn't do it before the end, either.

Many years later I find myself by the shores of a northern ocean, surrounded by bone-dry mountains. Usually there would be snow by this time of year. There is no indication that it is winter, for it is always icy now. I know because my internal clock is electronic, therefore maintainable, therefore much more reliable than the nonexistent seasons these days.

I find myself here because I have been tracing a transmission for months, which has recently changed. Many have come to this place, hoping to find a safe haven-and many have died for their desperation.

I have been attempting to plan a raid on this mysterious, unassailable base of operations for some time-but it seems that someone has already beaten me to it, someone whose voice sounds so familiar. But my memory has been failing again for some time. I know I may not have much time left.

All this time has brought me to a strange realization. I stand in an unusually unique position-that of the person standing at the other side, watching the world journey toward me, shaping itself into a place where I belong. I can no longer be considered a survivor. I was the first-and perhaps the worst-of this world. But I appeared much too late for anyone to change the events that transpired. I was merely a casualty of war. This is my afterlife.

Can the afterlife come to an end?

I glance away from the shore and back toward the narrow, blasted road that led me through the mountains. Like an echo to my thoughts, a line of people draws closer and closer, a line that snakes back into the mountains for miles. Some ride in various conveyances, perhaps out of habit or because of nostalgia, but most of them walk. They have little need of sustenance. They turn their dark, stone-carved faces up to the heavy, weary sky. Some may have sighed, but they have no need to breathe, and most have stopped doing so.

And still they march, and still the line does not end.

They are the tainted yet living. They are the next generation. They are not the survivors, for nothing remains of the old world. Yet they are not the dead, for they look and listen and remember. These are all the ones like me.

They are the firstborn.

They stretch their hands out to the ocean. They stretch their hands out to a salvation denied them because of their heritage. They have inherited madness from their makers, and they have made it their wn, a weapon in their hands.

And then I see it in the distance. It gleams, massive and metallic, as it makes its slow, ponderous way toward the dock some distance down the shore from us. We turn to it, I and the children of the dead. We watch it dock.

I smell many lives on the wind, yet one is familiar yet not. My mind knows it only from speculation. It is not quite what I imagined, so for a moment I do not recognize it.

A hot wind blows through the pass, up from the south-hot compared to the icy pall that has fallen over most of the world. The clouds swirl uneasily, and thunder rumbles a distant warning.

I watch as a figure moves slowly off the ship, on to the dock, and toward dry land. Time may have dimmed my memory of its features, but I would know that face anywhere.

She steps on to the shore and calls to me. "If I were the being I was when I last saw you, I would have sensed you coming."

I say nothing. I have not spoken for years, and for a moment I wonder if I even can.

"It's going to rain," she said, walking toward me, "for the first time in years." She walks in silence, and stops in front of me. "Why are you here?" She gestures to the crowd behind me. "That could explain the raids. If you find them before they turn, you ce have found a way to make them like you-some of them, those with the willpower."

I shake my head, I didn't make them. They did not need me.

I shake my head. God knows.

"Have they stolen your voice?"

I shake my head again. I do not think so. I look at her and realize-the moment of contact, all those years ago, had created a faint sense of her no matter where she is ...

But it is gone. She stands in front of me, meets my eyes, and creates no close mental rapport, nothing to communicate or restore any thought or memory. It is not because she has shielded, because she has never shielded. I would know.

It is because she can't. She lives again within the barriers of a natural mind.

Something wet lands on my cheek. I have little to no sense of touch anymore, but I can see it, and I look up.

A low moan rises from the crowd behind me-longing, anguish, despair, emptiness. They know it. They are denied salvation. We are gods among the mortals and the unliving, here in hell.

The rain begins to fall harder, until it runs in rivulets down my face, making tracks across the tatters of my coat, washing down to the thirsty, dry ground. Hundreds of faces lift to the sky, mouths open, to catch raindrops like children. They look like children, lost children-if children can look utterly desolate, if children could be disfigured, terrible images out of old world nightmares.

The woman before me, the only one of us allowed salvation, lifts her face to the sky as well. Softly she says, "Look."

A rift has opened in the clouds. The sky beyond is bright blue. My memory has failed to the point where I can no longer think of something that quite matches that color.

The sunrise may symbolize salvation; it has often seemed to.

But it's come too late.

And all around us, it is raining again.

Chapter Two

Here's the dream itself ... minus the music and the movie and all that stuff. Some of it is my mind's symbols for various things. It's very random ...

I sat in the center of a small room, filled with long feathers and feather boas. They all seemed to have some buoyancy, and they drifted around slowly, but no more thathree feet above the floor. There I was happy, there I was safe. I curled up in the center of the feathers and they packed themselves down around me, like blankets and pillows, and I went to sleep, listening to them rustle softly.

I woke up and the room was emptying, with the quiet rushing sound of feathers flowing quickly away. Within seconds, it was completely bare. I scrambled to my feet, and a door in the wall opened, and-

I was standing on a hillside, looking down into a city. The ground almost seemed to ripple, and the whole center of the city imploded, a pillar of fire rising into the morning, eating away at the sky. I ran into the city, I ran for miles, I gave myself to motion and ran until I couldn't run anymore.

I stood in a courtyard and looked down at my face, but it did not look like my face. It was the face of the end. And I thought: I have died here. I died once out of sight of the sun. I died once in sight of the morning.

But I was only looking at my reflection.

I ran away from the city, away from the radiation. But I could never escape what made me. As I ran from it, it spread, and over time, the world died. I wandered for years, bitter and angry and empty. I wandered until the world was dead, until the sky was black, until I traveled an unrecognizable desert world. I stood at the far end, watching the world come to me. The only things living in this world were the demons and the crazies and me, but if I wasn't alive and I wasn't dead and I wasn't undead, then what was I?

I wandered until I found myself on the banks of the ocean, but the water was empty. Distantly I thought that there was something wrong, that the waves had a strange hissing quality to them, and that the water wasn't usually so dark.

I turned back, looked out across the desert, and saw something in the distance. It was a great line of figures, hundreds of thousands of them, walking over the sand. They plodded slowly toward the shore, many of them stooped, their hands swinging out before them. There were so many, they must have come for miles. Someone else was running toward me, and she was much closer, and she lifted her face and called my name.

And she fell, her eyes filled with surprise, her face a startled question mark. Above me, the clouds swirled slowly. Now I could hear them, grumbling and sighing as they approached. The line folded in upon itself many times, to form many lines, but suddenly they all stopped, and looked up.

I looked up with them. The clouds had cracked, the wind pulling them apart. Through the rift they formed I could see the sky, the clear, blessed sky.

Something spattered on to the sand, and as one the thousands, drawn here by some unknowable compulsion, staggered wearily to their knees. Most of them swayed there, as the sky opened up, and opened their mouths to the water. It was hot and strange, but it was water.

It was raining again.

But it was already too late.


End file.
